Posts Tagged dcgs
Bug in Adobe Reader/Acrobat 9.0 causes crash when the user’s Application Data is on a network share.
Warning for any system administrators thinking of deploying the newly released Adobe Reader 9.0, or it’s big brother Adobe Acrobat 9.0: if your users have Group Policy applied that uses Group Policy Folder Redirection to move their Application Data directory to a network share (with or without Roaming Profiles), it will cause Adobe Reader/Acrobat to crash almost immediately after launching. I have had this confirmed by Adobe UK Support as a known issue, and there is currently no ETA for a fix.
The issue has been reported by a handful of users on the Adobe Forums and some of my users ran into it after I began a test roll-out of Acrobat on our site yesterday.
The School ‘Holidays’
You’ve probably picked up before now that I work in a school. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of my friends are teachers. I’m well aware that a few of them will read this, so to them I say, this isn’t anything personal.
That said, I am now going to rant about my #1 pet peeve about teachers.
It’s fair to say that teachers’ holidays are somewhat infamous. The general public views them as having an enormous amount of holiday time, in particular the 5-6 weeks during the summer, but also the week or two at Easter, Christmas, and the week in the middle of each term. On top of that, they have their mystical short hours because ‘they go home at 3.45′. Most people who don’t work in education do not factor in the late hours many teachers put in at home after school on a regular basis, or that many do lesson preparation during the aforementioned holidays. Teachers themselves are the first to rant whenever there’s a discussion about ‘how easy teachers have it with all that holiday’, which is why what I am about to describe pisses me off even more.
Whenever school restarts after a break (and I guarantee this will happen on Monday, the first day back after half term) someone will ask me, “Did you have a nice break?”
Promotion
In all the excitement, I almost forgot to mention the thing I’ve been having to keep quiet about for over a month.
Last week I put in an application for a new position at work, and following an interview earlier this week, I have been appointed IT Support Manager at Challoner’s, effective 1st February (i.e., next week).
To cut a long story short, I approached my boss a couple of weeks before Christmas to express my interest in doing further internal training and taking on more responsibility, although there was no real position to fulfil that as the IT roles that existed at Challoner’s were ‘IT Technician’ (the job I already had) and ‘Network Manager’ (the position which my boss isn’t planning to vacate any time soon). It turns out that senior management had seen this day coming and had already discussed what to do about it, so in quite short order the wheels started to turn to create a new position that could I slot into. Huzzah! etc.
High Contrast Mode stuck on in Windows Vista
We recently ran into a problem at with a few kids at school who had ‘accidentally’ activated High Contrast Mode in Vista by accidentally pressing Shift+Alt+PrtScrn, and couldn’t turn it off again. I say ‘accidentally’ because we’ve recently seen kids doing this to each other deliberately as this month’s Favourite Game of the Month™ (previous winners of Favourite Game of the Month™ include using a hotkey to rotate the screen so it is upside down, and vandalising Wikipedia).
High Contrast Mode is an accessibility feature in Windows that causes the desktop theme to switch off of Aero (or whatever is currently set) onto an almost completely black scheme with white text. It also disables the desktop wallpaper and changes the background colours of applications like Word to black, so it appears the user is typing white text onto black paper.
Despite repeated use of the Shift+Alt+PrtScrn shortcut, High Contrast Mode refused to turn off. Their desktop wallpaper did return, indicating that it was trying to switch out of High Contrast Mode, but not fully succeeding. Our students tend to have much of the Control Panel locked down (as I outlined above, the little bastards cherubs like to fiddle and break things), so the Control Panel applet to turn this off was not available to them, but even making it available and using the applet did not work.
I couldn’t find any mention of this via Google, and so it took me a little while to work out what was going on. I eventually traced this problem to an incorrect setting in the Registry. Here’s what it was, and how to fix it
Hibernation
While tidying IT4 today, we found a long-lost IT technician in hibernation.
